Richard Fernandez:
“Nichole Gracely has a master’s degree and was one of Amazon’s best order pickers. Now, after protesting the company, she’s homeless” — by choice, she declares in the Guardian [1]. ‘Being homeless is better than working for Amazon’ says the article, which details the act of protest by voluntary unemployment.
I received $200 a week for the following six months and I haven’t had any source of regular income since those benefits lapsed. I sold everything in my apartment and left Pennsylvania as fast as I could. I didn’t know how to ask for help. I didn’t even know that I qualified for food stamps.
I furthered my Amazon protest while homeless in Seattle. When the Hachette dispute flared up, I “flew a sign,” street parlance for panhandling with a piece of cardboard: “I was an order picker at amazon.com. Earned degrees. Been published. Now, I’m homeless, writing and doing this. Anything helps.”
She was ‘alienated’ and left. For years Marxism has maintained that mere paid work is usually alienating. (Entfremdung [2]) was a condition of misery caused by believing in something beyond ourselves which made it impossible to be ourselves. To be happy you should forget transcendence and get in touch with your inner animal. Do your thing.
Gracely could not be herself as a warehouse worker and hence left. But Amazon may not ask be calling Gracely back to work any time soon. Perhaps in acknowledgement that warehouse work is inhuman after all, the company has started to hire robots. More likely however, Amazon gave no thought to alienation. They did it to save money.
ABC News [3] describes the company’s new ‘robot army’, fifteen thousand strong. They never quit. Never get bored and don’t even have the concept of choosing liberating homelessness.
A year ago, Amazon.com workers like 34-year-old Rejinaldo Rosales hiked miles of aisles each shift to “pick” each item a customer ordered and prepare it for shipping.
Now the e-commerce giant boasts that it has boosted efficiency and given workers’ legs a break by deploying more than 15,000 wheeled robots to crisscross the floors of its biggest warehouses and deliver stacks of toys, books and other products to employees.
“We pick two to three times faster than we used to,” Rosales said during a short break from sorting merchandise into bins at Amazon’s massive distribution center in Tracy, California, about 60 miles east of San Francisco. “It’s made the job a lot easier.”
The harsh reality is that for an ever expanding list of occupations, robots are the workers of choice. All our Entfremdung are belong to them. As this video shows, humans in Amazon warehouses are still employed to “pick” the items the robots bring and put them in boxes. But it may simply be a matter of time until robots do that too.
Another British newspaper [4] sadly notes that that Microsoft has started replacing human guards in routine tasks. “The security guard of future is five feet tall, Wi-Fi-equipped and looks uncannily like a cross between a Dalek and EVE from Wall-E. This is the K5 Autonomous Data Machine, the first product from Californian start-up Knightscope designed to replace human guards everywhere from schools to offices.” And they cost $6.25 an hour to employ.
Although everyone has heard of the sad events in Ferguson Missouri, fewer have heard of the tragic developments in Paterson New Jersey. Of the 594 students [5] in the Paterson School District [6], whose motto is “preparing all children for college and a career”, who took the SAT only 19 managed to pass.
In Paterson, New Jersey only 19 kids who took the SAT’s are considered college ready. This means that they scored at least a 1500 out of 2400 on the standardized test, and this number is truly shocking considering how large the school district is.
Paterson resident Jason Williams is one of the lucky ones. He just graduated high school last year and has been enrolled in college since September, after taking the SAT’s three times determined to score over 1500. He says that the key to his success was not falling victim to the streets.
“Just last summer, my friend and teammate, he was shot and killed that summer and that really affected me,” he said.
Faced with this daunting challenge “the Paterson school district said that they no longer use SAT scores to gauge students’ success.” Shifting the goal posts might have been a viable strategy in the past, but it is unlikely to prevail against the ever-improving skills of robot workers. Nobody is going to beat a pathway to the Paterson school district seeking aspiring warehouse workers or security guards.
Those Amazon robots are awesome!
One of the stories about them today said they can save the company a lot of money since, over their lifespan, they only cost (as an average) $6.90/hour.
That compared to what humans must be paid for slower work and less productivity.
Interestingly, Amazon has yet to post a profit!